Building a Metcalfe Church? Here’s how to add stained glass windows

Models of churches for layouts look great but typically miss one vital element.

Look at any church built from the middle ages onwards and you can’t help but notice the gloriously stained glass windows depicting images from history, the biblical or literature.

Yet sadly, while models of churches of our layouts are increasingly realistic they still lack these beautiful coloured windows.

For religious buildings, craftsman coloured the glass by adding metallic oxide powders or finely divided metals to the molten glass. Copper was used for green or bluish green, cobalt to achieve deep blue, and gold produces wine red and violet glass.

I don’t know about you, but I’d probably draw the line at adding metallic powders to molten glass for my model making.

Luckily, Klaas Jansma has come up with an alternative and, thankfully, simpler way to recreate the effect for scale models.

Using nothing more than felt-tip pens, Klaas places coloured dots on the windows of his N scale Metcalfe church and with stunning results.

He uses permanent marker pens, as this doesn’t smudge and dries ‘almost instantly’.

Adding lights to the inside to illuminate the colouring brings them out even further.

It’s slow work but I think you’ll agree it’s definitely worth the time. Klaas uses this technique on his Metcalfe paper card models but there’s no reason why similar couldn’t be used with plastic and resin church models.

Klaas Jansma’s church photo reproduced by kind permission. Tree of Jesse public domain.